The Empire Strikes Out:
The “New Imperialism” and Its Fatal Flaws

Ivan Eland, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of Putting "Defense'" Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post–Cold War World (2001).

Executive Summary

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks on the United States, several commentators
have advanced the idea of security through
empire. They claim that the best way to protect
the United States in the 21st century is to emulate
the British, Roman, and other empires of the
past. The logic behind the idea is that if the
United States can consolidate the international
system under its enlightened hegemony,
America will be both safer and more prosperous.
Although the word "empire" is not used, the
Bush administration's ambitious new National
Security Strategy seems to embrace the notion of
neoimperialism.

The idea, however, ignores the fact that
today's world bears little resemblance to the one
over which Britain or Rome once presided. Two
differences are obvious: First, the world is far
more interconnected today, which makes the
consequences of sanctimonious, arrogant, or
clumsy international behavior riskier politically,
diplomatically, and economically. Second, the
potential costs associated with making enemies
today are far greater than they were for empires
past. Indeed, the British and the Romans were
the targets of assassinations, arson, and other
forms of anti-imperial backlash, but that activity
was typically small-scale and took place far from
the mother country. Forms of backlash today, in
contrast, could be large-scale and directed at
America's homeland.

Most of all, the strategy of empire is likely to
overstretch and bleed America's economy and its
military and federal budgets, and the overextension
could hasten the decline of the United
States as a superpower, as it did the Soviet Union
and Great Britain. The strategy could also have
the opposite effect from what its proponents
claim it would have; that is, it would alarm other
nations and peoples and thus provoke counter-balancing
behavior and create incentives for
other nations to acquire weapons of mass
destruction as an insurance policy against
American military might.